


there was this boy who tore my heart in two

by snowdarkred



Category: From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series
Genre: M/M, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-01
Updated: 2014-09-01
Packaged: 2018-02-15 13:53:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,557
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2231508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/snowdarkred/pseuds/snowdarkred
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He goes north, and north, and north, until they’re looking at a forest that stops for twenty feet and then starts again. The border. Canada.</p><p>He looks at the gap. There’s a road on this side of the border, but not on that side. There are trees, rushing up towards him and consuming the earth, a sea of green so different from the rust haze that trails after them, all the way back to Mexico.</p>
            </blockquote>





	there was this boy who tore my heart in two

**Author's Note:**

> Title from [Goin' Down by The Pretty Reckless](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RuaOQluuFw).
> 
> Warning for: show-consistent bad language, some violence, and oh, you know, incest.

Seth and Kate re-enter the United States through Reynosa-McAllen. He steals them the shittiest Honda Civic he can find. He throws the Spanish language maps he found on the passenger seat into the glove box to make room for her, and then he drives blindly north. He needs to get distance. He needs to put a whole country in between him and what’s left of his brother, and maybe, maybe then the pounding in his head will ease. 

Maybe then his hands will stop shaking. Maybe he’ll stop feeling his brother like a physical bullet hole in his fucking back. 

He drives the Honda until they get to Arkansas, where he takes a mean looking Jeep that will take them even farther. He goes north, and north, and north, until they’re looking at a forest that stops for twenty feet and then starts again. The border. Canada.

He looks at the gap. There’s a road on this side of the border, but not on that side. There are trees, rushing up towards him and consuming the earth, a sea of green so different from the rust haze that trails after them, all the way back to Mexico. 

They leave the Jeep on the side of the road with the keys in the ignition, and together they cross the gap.

 

\---

 

He doesn’t trust his instincts anymore, but he’s got little else. Instincts and money. And Kate. They walk until there’s a road, and then they hitchhike, sitting in the back of a Canadian hick’s generously offered truck bed. The guy makes a little conversation through the sliders; Seth can catch about half of it whipping at him with the wind, a stream of oddly shaped _abouts_ and _ehs_ that sound more foreign than any Spanish at this point.

He gets them dropped off on the outskirts of the largest nearby city, which is apparently Winnipeg. 

He pickpockets until they have enough for a cheap motel room, two queen beds side by side on top of dirty carpet, because sleaze doesn’t stop at the border. 

They need money. They need papers. They need fake names and a backstory and some kind of plan.

Kate wants to go to a hockey game, so they go to a hockey game.

It’s summer, so there aren’t a whole lot of options, even in Canada, but there’s some junior league doing a training camp and the tickets are three dollars a piece. Kate is wearing clothes that they shoplifted at a Walmart in Missouri, and Seth feels naked in a t-shirt and jeans. He wears a hoodie to hide his gun, and luckily it’s cold enough inside the rink that it doesn’t get him too many odd looks, summer aside.

Seth doesn’t know anything about hockey, and neither does Kate, but they cheer at the appropriate times and eat the terrible food available at the concession stands. The woman next to them keeps talking on her cellphone in French.

He can’t stop scanning the crowd. He wonders if any of them have any idea what’s out there in the world, what’s creeping up from Mexico like so many locusts. He wonders if there’s anything like that in Canada, if the native people here have a demi-goddess who drinks blood and terrorizes the night. Maybe there’s a different one here. Maybe it’s were-beavers.

Supernatural bullshit.

“I saw an ad,” Kate says, bringing him back to the present. She does that a lot.

“What?” he asks dumbly. Someone on the ice does something fancy with a stick, and the crowd roars in approval. There are too many damn people here for some training camp of sixteen year olds. These people and their hockey. 

“There’s an ad, for a job here,” Kate repeats. “Maybe we should get some papers or something, get jobs.”

Papers or something, he thinks. He has enough money to cover that, if he can find the right guy. Person. One of his best paper guys in the States is a woman. Mustn’t block any opportunities from stupidity. He’s always been shit at planning things on his own, has gotten caught or nearly caught ever time he tries. 

But Kate has a plan. 

Papers or something.

“Okay,” he says, because it’s not like they have anything else to do. They’re really just waiting, honestly. For what, he doesn’t want to speculate. 

 

\---

 

Kate gets a job with the hockey team.

“Winnipeg Blues,” she tells him, like that has any kind of meaning to him. His family was never much into sports; he couldn’t tell you the names of more than four American football teams, much less a single NHL team. 

“This is the MJHL, the Manitoba Junior Hockey League,” she tells him, like she had any idea what that was either just two days ago. She’s too damn smart. Her eyes are too damn bright.

Her new papers say she’s nineteen, but she’d barely turned seventeen when this whole nightmare began. Their papers say they’re siblings, that he’s her older brother. That they have dual citizenship. That their last name is _Rogers_ , which makes Seth’s skin itch, because he’s never been anything less than a Gecko. 

Her job is answering phones, speaking in a soft Southern curl that makes people pause. They’re too polite to ask questions, but there’s suspicion in people’s eyes. They’re all polite, so polite, so very polite even as they say shit things about immigrants and foreigners. 

Sleaze isn’t the only thing that doesn’t stop at the border. 

 

\---

 

Seth doesn’t know what he’s doing here. 

They’ve moved on from the seedy hotel into a seedy apartment, a one bedroom basement that cost them six hundred Canadian dollars a month. Seth sleeps on a ratty sleeper sofa in the living room while Kate sleeps on the rickety twin bed they found at a consignment shop. Its metal frame rattles when she turns over at all, loud enough to make Seth feel not so alone as he stares at the ceiling, waiting for sleep that always catches him unawares. 

He doesn’t have a job. Kate makes just enough to cover rent, putting in her twenty-two hours a week with the team, but it’s not enough to really live on. He supplements their income with sly fingers and hands and smiles, stealing from all those polite Canadians. There’s a rape the next street over from their apartment. There’s a murder near the bus stop. 

There’s a seedy part of every city, even here.

 

\---

 

Kate finds a little church in their rundown part of town. She doesn’t go every week, but she goes. Seth goes with her, because he doesn’t know what else to do, but he sits outside on the steps, sprawling lazily and waiting with his legs haphazard, because this has never been his thing. 

He didn’t believe in God, because he had believed in Richie. And now Richie is— 

And he doesn’t know how Kate can go inside and listen to a preacher not unlike her daddy say words of faith, not when they had seen what they had seen. Not when they had done what they had done. 

He doesn’t let himself think of Richie when he can help it. He watches the news, sees reports of murders and arson and a trail of bodies heading from Mexico through Texas, going up and up, spreading like sick veins across the country. Soon Canada might not feel far enough. Soon the shaking of his hands will return and that twenty foot gap of trees on the border will burn as Santanico and the Nine Lords spread their poison further and further. 

War. It’s a war, fought in the bloodstreams of humanity, where neither side cares about the cost. 

The tinny church bell rings, and the doors open. People straggle out, and among them is Kate. Seth stands and walks beside her back to their shitty little apartment. 

This is the longest time he’s gone without pulling a job, with the exception of his time in prison. He feels like he’s going to crawl out of his skin, like there are just so many snakes snapping at his heels. 

“You can come inside too, you know,” Kate says. 

“I don’t think so,” Seth says. It’s not like all those crosses and faith helped them in that hellhole anyway. Not like a gun and a wooden stake did. 

 

\---

 

Winter comes hard, and the killings in the southern United States slow to a trickle. They haven’t come north, stopping at the Mason Dixon line, but Seth doesn’t relax. 

Snakes are mostly dormant in winter. 

 

\---

 

They make and steal money, and they don’t save as much as they should. They go to hockey games, and Kate makes shy eyes at hockey players who glance at Seth and then away. They don’t talk about Richie but once—

_“She’s in his head,” Kate had said. “She did so many terrible things in his head. Freddie said that she made him do those things—”_

_“He’s always been a killer,” Seth interrupted, but Kate kept going._

_“—yeah, but not that kind of killing. Not this kind.”_

_Seth had turned away, but he couldn’t help but think of the bruises their father left on his skin and the black eyes Richie sometimes had or how he would watch their father behind his glasses, narrow eyed and slightly bared teeth, like an animal, like a snake waiting to strike._

—and Seth had left. Gone out and gotten drunk and insulted someone’s favorite hockey team, now that he knew what teams to insult, and he fought them in the street until the cops came and he ran. 

Kate didn’t say anything when he showed up the next day, bloody and bruised and still a little drunk. She finished getting ready for work and left without speaking a word. 

 

\---

 

Richie and Seth have always tangled. Tangled in fights, tangled in bed, tangled in cars — in banks, in vaults, in the shadows. They tangle with the law, playing hide and seek. They tangle with other thieves, stealing from them with a grin wilder than blood in the desert. 

And now they’re tangled with snake demons, or a goddess, or whatever you want to call the bitch who rises at night and drinks blood like so much water.

 

\---

 

Winters in Winnipeg are colder than anything either of them have ever experienced before. 

 

\---

 

Seth gets a real, actual job. Sort of. Well, it’s illegal, but there’s paperwork and everything. A salary. Taxes.

This isn’t the life he expected himself to be living, but then again, he had always expected Richie to be there too.

 

\---

 

“Did my brother die?” Kate asks one night. The sixteen year olds have one a game, so she was in good spirits when she came home, but being in a franchise that depends on teenagers makes her wistful sometimes. 

“I don’t know,” he says. _I don’t think so_ , he doesn’t add, because he’s really not sure. He can’t remember if he saw Scott among Santanico’s faithful, begging to die by the sun. He doesn’t think so, but he couldn’t take his eyes off of Richie — off of Richie and Santanico, off the snake that broke her chains. 

 

\---

 

Winter passes. The playoffs come. Seth moves up the food chain, and Kate gets a raise. They move into a better apartment. 

The killings in the US pick up again, spreading further and further. There are reports all over the news, even here in Canada, of the blood-filled streets in the south, flowing ever higher and higher. 

Colorado. Utah. Indiana. Pennsylvania. Oregon. 

Santianico had something was coming. That’s what the Ranger was so afraid of, wasn’t it? Something was coming, something was going to happen, and people were going to die.

Seth can feel Richie, just there. In the distance.

 

\---

 

He sees things now too, now that he looks. Odd things. Shadows that don’t move right. Patterns that shift under everyone’s feet like loose sand. There’s more than _culebras_ lurking in the dark.

 

\---

 

“I don’t know why you think I know what I’m doing,” Kate says. She’s chopping vegetables. 

“Well, you’ve been a pretty good cook so far,” Seth says lazily from the even rattier couch they replaced the sleeper sofa with, now that he has a bedroom too. He can still hear her turn over at night on that terrible bed frame they bought. “I’m not dead yet, at least.”

“I’m not talking about that, and you know it,” she snaps. She puts down the knife. “You act like I have some kind of plan. Like I know what I’m doing. We’re here because I said, hey, let’s stay here, and that was enough for you.”

Seth shrugs. “I don’t have anything better to do. Do you? Want to go hang out with your friends at the mall? Oh wait, neither of us have made any of those. Go back and finish high school? The United States thinks we’re dead.” He’d looked it up online, sitting in some shitty internet cafe looking like every other pervert either too poor or too chicken-shit to use something more direct. After _las culebras_ abandoned the temple and the Nine Lords moved on to whatever the fuck they were doing, the Mexican government raided the place. Found blood and bodies and a graveyard of cars. 

There are neatly sharped stakes collecting in the corners of their apartment. Seth makes them when he can’t sleep. He doesn’t know who will come for them, or when, but he wants to be ready when they do. 

It might even be his brother.

“You’re the one with experience with this,” Kate says. “Living on the run, bein’ on the wrong side of the law. I’m just a girl.”

“No you’re not,” Seth says. 

Kate looks down and away. She picks up the knife and resumes chopping, and the conversation cuts off. But the words are still there. 

 

\---

 

There’s a man in a black cowboy hat and for a second Seth thinks he might be— 

But the man turns, and he’s not.

 

\--- 

 

“You smell like a snake,” the woman snarls. There’s something wrong with her face, with the way her muscles move under her skin. Her eyes glitter in the darkness, the only bright points in the city night aside from the streetlight down the road. 

Seth doesn’t hesitate. He shoots her. Head. Stomach. Chest. He pulls out the small wooden stake he keeps sheathed at his waist like a knife, and he pludges it through her sternum and into her heart. 

She turns to dust under his hands. 

She wasn’t a snake. She was something... _else_. 

 

\--- 

 

He comes home ( _home_ , this isn’t _home_ , not without Richie, but it is, but it _isn’t_ ) and Kate’s watching TED Talks, one absurdly uplifting video filled with cliched and banal stories after another. It’s times like these that he’ll find it hard to remember what she’s capable of, but then she’ll turn and look at him with those coldly steady eyes, and he’ll remember that she did what he could never do — that she gave her father the gift of death, while Seth knows, knows, that he’ll never be able to kill Richie. 

He’ll never be as strong as her, this small seventeen year old who walked out of the temple cracked but whole.

Seth doesn’t think that he’s ever been whole. He and Richie were born a year apart to the day. Irish twins.

Linked forever through destiny, it appears. The trickster brothers who won at the gods’ own game. 

Fuck.

“Have you noticed?” he asks. “Have you noticed all the others in the world, all the other freaks?”

“Yes,” she replies, looking at him. She looks at his shaking hands and shifts aside, just barely. An invitation to sit. 

He sits. On the floor, at her feet. He puts his head on her knee, and she strokes her hand through his hair, hesitantly at first. 

“If I hadn’t been so stupid, none of this would have happened,” he rambles. “If I hadn’t gotten caught and sent to jail, she would never have got her fangs in him. He’d be—he’d be here, with me.”

“He’ll come,” Kate says. She sounds sure. He tilts his head and looks up at her. She kisses his forehead. “Don’t worry, Seth, he’s coming.”

 

\--- 

 

By the middle of summer it’s a national crisis. South America is burning. Mexico is covered in ashes. America is so drenched in blood that it’s lapping around Canada’s ankles. 

 

\--- 

 

Seth is walking home ( _home_ ) when someone — something — grabs him. He’s pulled into an alley, and he’s ready to put up a fight, but—

He recognizes those hands, the outline of those cheekbones. 

“Richie,” he starts to say, but Richie kisses him, harsh and hard. Like always.

There have never been any soft moments between them, never. They were raised on hard edges, on sharp words and the impact of fists. They repulse and attract each other, this circular battle for space, for dominance, for coexistence in a world where they want to subsume and consume each other, use each other up. Tangled so tightly it’s a knot and noose around their necks. Seth’s hands tug on the collar of Richie’s shirt; he rips it gracelessly, but that doesn’t matter. 

“Richie, how could you—” he starts to say when he can, but Riche slithers in hand into Seth’s pants, and he can’t, he can’t finish, he can’t— 

He comes in his pants with his eyes wide open, staring at his brother. Just over Richie’s shoulder, he can see  Santanico, smiling with gleaming fangs. He blinks slowly, once, and when he looks again, they’re both gone. 

Like they were never there.

 

\--- 

 

“Maybe we should pack up and move,” Seth suggests. Kate gives him a hard look. She started going to that little church a little more regularly, and now she’s one of the women who bring food to the congregation. Putting her expanding cooking skills to good use. Sometimes he’ll come home and find a stranger on their couch or in their kitchen, watching her work as she talks softly to them, always moving steadily as she slices and dices and throws things together. 

“I don’t think we should,” she says. He protests, but she shakes her head, and no matter how much he paces or even shouts, she won’t consider it.

The only thing he can think of doing is going further north. Always further north. His brother is at the border, and they could go all the way to the Arctic, and it still wouldn’t be far enough. Running anywhere wouldn’t be far enough.

He’s not even sure what direction his feet want to run in.

 

\---

 

The blood hits the streets of Canada. 

 

\---

 

He comes home and finds Santanico sitting on their couch. Scott is beside her. Richie isn’t there.

“I thought vampires needed an invitation,” he says, even though he doesn’t think that applies to _las culebras_. 

“I invited them,” Kate says from the tiny kitchen. She’s making food, yes, and not blood. She invited them, but she’s not catering to them. 

“Where’s my brother?” Seth asks the snake bitch. 

“Busy,” Santanico answers, almost challengingly. Seth narrows his eyes at her, and his hand goes to the stake sheathed at his waist. “He’ll be back in a moment.”

There’s immediately a knock on the door, and Seth knows it’s Richie. He can feel him, can tell it’s him — supernatural timing aside.  Seth finds himself opening the door, and there Richie is, looking just like he did in the vision or whatever that was that made Seth come in his pants like a teenager. That was one hell of an awkward walk home. 

They, well. They kiss, right there in the doorway. It’s sharp, not a nice kiss at all, and when they break apart Seth punches Richie right in his stupid selfish fucking face.

“You asshole!” he shouts.

“Jackass!” Richie shouts back. Seth pulls him into the apartment and shoves him, hard. His brother doesn’t even shift on his feet, doesn’t move. It’s like pushing against a flesh covered rock.

“Boys,” Santanico says condescendingly. Richie immediately backs away, but Seth sneers at him and at her, ready to make any manner of insulting comments, but Kate says _Seth_ very softly and he doesn’t.

Fuck. 

Scott won’t look at any of them, sitting small and awkward next to Santanico. Kate’s face goes tight when she glances at him, which makes Seth want to jump and do whatever it takes to fix it, but he doesn’t, because she wouldn’t want him to.

Richie pulls out two flasks and gives them to the snake bitch and Kate’s brother. There’s a small splatter of blood on his sleeve. _So that’s what he was doing_ , Seth thinks.

“Look,” Kate says. “We all need to talk. The world is burning, and I’m not going to let us burn with it.”

“They’re the ones who poured lighter fluid on everything and lit the match!” Seth can’t stop himself from saying. 

“I don’t care,” Kate snaps. “All I want is for as many of us to get through this alive as possible.” She looks at her brother. “As many as possible.”

Santanico blinks laconically. She smiles, the same smile he saw in his vision. “Yes.” She sweeps her gaze over all them before settling back on Kate. “As many as possible.” 

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first thing I've written in quite some time, and it's something I wrote in all of a few hours, so please forgive what faults it has. I consumed the first season in a day and felt the overwhelming urge to write something.


End file.
